Giving Names to Souls Forgotten No Longer
December 13, 2007
By Peter Applebome, New York Times
 

There was no reason to think that anyone would ever care to remember the 910 or so anonymous souls buried in a distant sloping glade under the T-shaped metal markers with no names, just numbers.
They had, after all, been almost invisible in life. Why try to glimpse them now?

But sometimes people find ways to make amends, however belated. And so here and in other relics of a long-gone world of institutionalized care for society’s outcasts, there’s a movement afoot to remember, to replace numbers with names, to acknowledge the worth of people who lived and died long ago in a world designed to be as distant as the stars.

You won’t find the old cemetery at Letchworth Village unless you look for it — down the gravel path, over the modest creek, into the woods off Call Hollow Road. From 1917 to 1967 it became the final resting place for almost 1,000 participants in a grand experiment that symbolized the aspirations and limitations of a distant era of institutionalized care. Back then it was the home for generations of people viewed generically as the “feebleminded”: the mentally ill, the mentally retarded, epileptics, the homeless and others with nothing to tether them to home, family or society.

Now, here and elsewhere, people are digging through records, checking death certificates, comparing numbers on graves with names in old ledgers, so these dead, too, will be remembered.

“It’s a way to bring dignity to these people,” said Jacqueline Ferrara, the ombudsman for the regional office of the state agency that provides services to people with developmental disabilities. Letchworth Village sent the last of its residents out into group homes in 1996. “There was a time when, I hate to say it, but it was like out of sight, out of mind. This is a way to remember that these were people whose lives had worth and who deserve to be remembered.”
Letchworth Village was never a perfect place, of course. How could it be?

Still, when it opened in Rockland County in 1911, the inspiration of William Pryor Letchworth, who had made a fortune in the harness business, the idea seemed breathtakingly noble for its time.

Instead of overcrowded Dickensian refuges for society’s most vulnerable, there would be a nurturing village in the woods with an acre of land for every inhabitant. Instead of Stygian high rises, there would be 130 rustic fieldstone cottages. There was a band, a Boy Scout troop and a self-sufficient community where residents farmed and raised cattle, pigs and chickens. They made toys to sell at Christmas, and when they died, unless they were taken to family burial plots, their remains went to the cemetery in the sloping two-acre grove.

  

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The dream outstripped the reality, and at its peak Letchworth Village had about twice the population originally forecast and some of its own horrors, caught up in allegations of mistreatment. And even from the start, whatever indignities that remained from life were compounded in death.

Whether because the state saw no need to pay for gravestones for people whose lives were so devalued anyway or because their families did not want the shame of their afflicted son or daughter, brother or aunt advertised to all who might come to visit, they were buried anonymously.

The graves were marked only by the numbered steel markers anchored to the ground by cement poured into industrial-size cans. In 1967, they began burying the dead in a second graveyard that did have headstones, but the old cemetery today has a capricious air of eerie repose, the hundreds of steel markers like odd industrial blooms augmented by occasional stray headstones paid for by family members.

As it turned out, it was the modern-day counterparts of the forgotten dead who first spoke up for them. At meetings of the so-called self advocates living in group homes, the subject of the cemeteries came up.

FROM that came a commitment on the part of the advocates and state agencies to bring dignity to the anonymous dead. The first place it was done was at what was once the Wassaic Developmental Center. There, a bronze marker in stone lists the names of some 625 of the dead under the heading: “In Memory of Those Who Shall Not Be Forgotten.”

At the old Letchworth Village cemetery, there’s a new planter and wooden sign at the entrance to the graveyard. Mrs. Ferrara is going through all the records to come up with names for a plaque planned for this spring.

It’s a gesture perhaps about symbolism as much as reality. Few people come to visit the site, most of whose denizens were buried a half-century to almost a century ago. Vandals have knocked over some of the markers, and there’s trash dumped in the woods leading up to it. Still, she walks through the cemetery, dead leaves swirling underfoot, metal markers listing this way and that, and says: “These are lives that should be recognized and celebrated and acknowledged, not as numbers, but as names. It’s the right thing to do.”
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